Magical Thinking on the Stage

Apparently Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking has been made into a play.
Here is the opening scene, taken verbatim from the first page of the book.

Vanessa Redgrave (who coincidentally enough we saw earlier in Howard's End) stars as Joan Didion in this play that premiered March 29th, 2007, two years after the book's release.

Here is the opening scene, I'm not sure what to make of it on stage.

Grief

Though I've never experienced real grief, I have to admit as long as I'm on the subject of loss, that I have mourned people as if they were dead when in reality I'd only lost the ability to see them, talk to them, and touch them every day.

Last summer, a year before I read The Year of Magical Thinking, I grieved the loss of a serious boyfriend as though he had died. I stumbled on a poem by Matthew Dickman in The New Yorker entitled "Grief," and immediately transcribed it in my journal for (what felt like at the time) its defeating applicability.

When grief comes to you as a purple gorilla

you must count yourself lucky.

You must offer her what’s left

of your dinner, the book you were trying to finish

you must put aside,

and make her a place to sit at the foot of your bed,

her eyes moving from the clock

to the television and back again.

I am not afraid. She has been here before

and now I can recognize her gait

as she approaches the house.

Some nights, when I know she’s coming,

I unlock the door, lie down on my back,

and count her steps

from the street to the porch.

Tonight she brings a pencil and a ream of paper,

tells me to write down

everyone I have ever known,

and we separate them between the living and the dead

so she can pick each name at random.

I play her favorite Willie Nelson album

because she misses Texas

but I don’t ask why.

She hums a little,

the way my brother does when he gardens.

We sit for an hour

while she tells me how unreasonable I’ve been,

crying in the checkout line,

refusing to eat, refusing to shower,

all the smoking and all the drinking.

Eventually she puts one of her heavy

purple arms around me, leans

her head against mine,

and all of a sudden things are feeling romantic.

So I tell her,

things are feeling romantic.

She pulls another name, this time

from the dead,

and turns to me in that way that parents do

so you feel embarrassed or ashamed of something.

Romantic? she says,

reading the name out loud, slowly,

so I am aware of each syllable, each vowel

wrapping around the bones like new muscle,

the sound of that person’s body

and how reckless it is,

how careless that his name is in one pile and not the other.

I read it now and shudder at how relatable that poem felt when I first read it. I imagined my ex-boyfriend's name in the pile of the dead, and was just as "unreasonable" as the narrator of the poem is. There were times last summer when I equated myself to the above narrator. Times when I lied down and welcomed the debilitating sadness that thinking about him brought.

Maybe there were a few moments when I was reasonable and recognized that the tragedy I was miring myself in was no tragedy at all, but for the most part I considered that boy's loss final and absolute. After all, I wondered, wasn't he as good as dead if I no longer had access to him, could no longer be with him?

You may wonder what terrible force separated us, and why I grieved for him as though he'd really disappeared forever. If I was so sick about it, why didn't I return to him? Why didn't we get back together? These questions are not as important as what happened when I thought of "Grief" this summer. As I was reading The Year of Magical Thinking, my mind kept returning to "Grief." Not only because it had become one of my favorite poems, but because I wondered if Didion had read it. I considered mailing it to her, with some corny note attached explaining how I thought it captured the inescapable sorrow she had described in her book, how I thought she would be able to appreciate it, to really understand its meaning.

I guess it occurred to me that even though I will always associate "Grief" with the first summer without my old boyfriend, that the poem wasn't really written for me. I suddenly understood that the sort of loss Matthew Dickman was capturing belongs to a person who has actually lost someone who was everything. And I wanted Joan Didion to read it, and maybe copy it into her journal, because I knew she would know what it was all about.

"i love you more than one more day"

To read Joan Didion's description of "the vortex effect" without reading the rest of The Year of Magical Thinking, you might think she was a woman who struggles to a keep a tight rein on her thoughts and feelings. But her piercing depiction of the year she lost her husband writer John Gregory Dunne, demonstrates that Didion is a master at balancing emotion and clear, linear thought.

"The vortex effect" is the agonizing thought process Didion finds herself trapped in after her husband dies unexpectedly one night at dinner after their return from the hospital where their grown daughter Quintana was in the intensive care unit. After John's death, Didion battles to find neutral territory in her heart. This inability to maintain more than a few minutes of thoughts that aren't related to her dead husband or ailing daughter is what Didion deems "the vortex effect." Time and time again, Didion returns to the two of them, her memories link to other memories that inevitably include John or Quintana in some way.

This book is a masterpiece. Didion captures the impossible sadness of bereavement with a poignancy only a seasoned writer could present. Very few books are able to matter as much as The Year of Magical Thinking will to readers. To quote part of John Leonard's New York Review of Books' review: "I can't imagine dying without this book."

I can't imagine living without this book. There is something so comforting in knowing there exists a perfectly articulated description of indescribable sadness.
I'm not over-complimenting Didion's work here. Even though I know The Year of Magical Thinking can't spare me from a magnitude of loss I have yet to experience, it will serve to reflect a whole slew of horrifying emotions in a more beautifully coherent way than I could ever hope to record.
And I'm sure that everyone who can relate to what Didion captures in her reflection is relieved to hold in their hands some of that agony.

only connect

This is the opening scene of the film adaptation of E.M. Forster's novel Howard's End.
No scene after it manages to capture the feeling the book evokes so well -- the feeling of finding yourself through conversations and relationships with other people. We are seeing Mrs. Wilcox meandering through the garden of her beloved Howard's End. And she is alone, she is not speaking to any of the guests inside of her house. But we don't feel that she is isolated, her adoration for her surroundings are apparent in the way she moves towards the house.

Howard's End presents connections that are meaningful to the reader. An unlikely friendship is forged between two very different women (Mrs. Wilcox and Miss Schegel), and the reader roots for them, wishing she could find such a well matched companion in a world full of hollow friendships.

I read Zadie Smith's tribute to Forster's Howard's End, before I read the latter. In On Beauty's acknowledgments, Smith writes "It should be obvious from the first line that this is a novel inspired by a love of E.M. Forster," and Smith often talks about her love for Forster in interviews.

From an interview with The Atlantic in 2005, Smith offered this explanation:

What about E. M. Forster's work made you want to pay, as you say, hommage to him?

I suppose he's my first love fiction-wise. He seems to me a very humane novelist—and one who's actually much more interesting than he appears to be on the surface. He's extremely English. If you're born here, he naturally means a lot to you. Beyond that, I don't really know. I just really like him.

Sorry, that's not a very good answer. I'm a little bit chilly outside a Starbucks in a really awful part of town. Sorry. Go on. I'll warm up, I'm sure.

Both novels are superb and sharp works of literature. But I will always be grateful to Smith for translating a universal story about the necessity of connecting with other people into modern language in a modern setting, where while the impediments to such connections may have changed, the damage of not connecting still crushes hearts.

time is how you spend your love

Thanks to The New York Observer, above is a photo of the aforementioned Nick Laird and Zadie Smith (or Lady Z, as Laird calls her in the dedication in his first book of poems To a Fault.

Lady Z is the glamorous (and only) woman in the middle, and her "dear Laird" (as she deems him in her dedication in the novel On Beauty) is to the right of her, the adorable one in the skinny tie.

Smith does more than just dedicate her book to her husband. She uses three of his poems in it. In fact, the title of her third novel is the name of the poem "On Beauty." In the novel, a modern day adaptation of E.M. Forster's Howard's End, Smith uses Laird's poem as one written by a main female character, Claire Malcolm. It serves as an example of a broken pantoum Claire, a professor, is going to give to her poetry class.

In the author's note, Smith thanks Laird "for allowing the last poem to be Claire's" and it is as simple as that.

No, we could not itemize the list of sins they can't forgive us.

how nothing can outlast its loss

Nick Laird is husband to one of my favorite writers of all time, Zadie Smith. He is also a well-respected poet from Northern Ireland. These two facts are important to consider together, because his marriage to Ms. Smith prompted my reading of his poems.

My interest in Nick and Zadie's marriage borders on voyeuristic.
I wonder about their daily activities. Do they write on separate floors in their home, shouting back and forth to each other when they've written something especially perfect? Are their nightly conversations in bed brimming with the lyrical genius evident in their writing? Do they compete with each other, comparing book reviews over lunch?
I don't know the answers to these questions, which is why I have to satisfy myself with Laird's most recent collection of poems entitled On Purpose. Luckily for me, they feature a meditation on marriage based on Sun Tzu's The Art of War that, at times, paints a painfully clear image of his marriage.

My favorite, "Offensive Strategy," offers plenty of insight into what sort of husband he might be.

Lately the tablets are making no difference.
I have started to cry during adverts again,
and dogs in particular set me off like a drain.

When I get into a fight queuing for petrol
you lie to your friends to account for my temper
and make me ring up for another appointment.

You want me to get a second opinion,
though you put it all down to my father,
just as my mother puts it all down to his.

Another way I can tell it is all going wrong
is I can't get enough nicotine in my system
and nothing will force me to speak.

I run for an hour and still can't get to sleep.
I seem to spend most of my time starting books
and then putting them back on the shelf.

Also, since punching the wall of the study
last Thursday I've been waking each dawn
with a fatter man's hand at the end of my wrist.

It is swollen and red and doesn't quite bend
while my fingers are stiff and insist on remaining
gestured away from the body, as if in disgust.

I love Laird's poetry. The url for this blog is in fact taken from his poem "On Beauty" (but more on that in my next post). "Offensive Strategy" demonstrates not only Laird's talent, but his bravery. He could not have written a more raw exposure of depression, and not once does he flinch. His ability to describe punching the wall with such lovely eloquence blows me away.
My favorite stanza beginning "Another way I can tell..." practically makes me want to take up smoking for the purpose of being able to use those lines when I simply do not want to talk to anyone.

As honest as Laird is in On Purpose, I can't imagine such personal revealings could be easy to share with the world. As much as I fantasize about a marriage between two writers, I think I might be livid if my husband wrote about our marriage with such truthful detail.

It cannot be easy to encounter the love of your life in black and white, presenting his struggles on the page in front of you. And so for now, I am content to bury myself in Laird's poems and not romanticize a marriage I know nothing about. After all, as honest as these poems are, no amount of words can ever capture the essence of anything, let alone a marriage.

starting is so strange

Not to begin on a self-defeating note, but if it weren't a class assignment, I would never start a blog. I don't consider my opinions interesting or insightful enough to project over the internet.
I only include this bit of self-deprecation to somehow ease my pain about the self-absorption that's about to commence. Never in my life have I used the prefix self so many times in one paragraph, and therein lies my biggest issue with blogging.

All of that aside (if you can still believe it), I'm excited for this project. I will be blogging about reading.

My relationship with books, stories, and poems will dominate this site. But not just my relationship with them. Their relationships with other mediums. The cause and effect of writing in the universe. How my mind creates links between poems and songs, books and films, stories and art. How those links exist far beyond me, coming together in a world full of beautiful words.

And to avoid boring all of my academically obligated readers to death, I'll share some fun (or depressing, shocking, hilarious, whatever they may be) tidbits about the writers I'm writing about. And that will be enlightening for all of us.

So here we go. Starting is so strange.